360x180 panos can be taken with a variety of gear, but they do get harder to take in certain situations.
The first factor, obviously, is scene coverage. Either taking multiple shots or using multiple cameras simultaneously (as Google does), you have to cover the entire sphere. You can use specialized lenses to maximize the coverage per shot, or take more shots and stitch. With a typical rectilinear wide-angle gear (say, an EF-S 10-22 @10mm on a Canon crop body), this may encompass 14 to 24 shots, and requires shooting multiple rows and possibly a zenith (straight up) and nadir (straight down). Or, you could use a fisheye lens and as few as four shots.
The second factor is parallax error. The closer objects of interest are in a panorama by this, the more critical parallax error between member images becomes, and the more you have to rotate the lens around its no-parallax point for a clean stitch. Some scenes allow for handholding, others may require a tripod and specialized panorama head.
A third factor is movement. Multiple images stitched together always holds the potential for creating "ghosts" or "clones" when the images are combined. If you need to capture a spherical view with a lot of moving subjects or from a moving vantage point, then you will need to take all the member images simultaneously, which will require a special multi-camera rig, or you have to be ok with motion blur, or taking multiple shots through time, and masking out the bits of moving things that could cause ghosts/clones.
A fourth factor is your stitching software: not all applications are capable of creating a 360x180 panorama, because the internal model of the panorama may be assuming cylindrical presentation or a less-than-360 degree field of view on the stitched panorama. One open source cross-platform package that can do 360x180 panoramas is Hugin.
A fifth factor is presentation of the panorama. Typically, some sort of specialized viewer that can pan through the image on the fly is required, and you need to get the panorama into the proper format for that viewer. There are a number of solutions, mostly based on HTML5 or Flash, but there is no specific universal format (especially since Apple stopped supporting QTVR cubics).
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